Globalization and innovations in communication systems have changed the manner in which society lives, does work, etc. Information technological revolutions, such as the Internet, have created a virtual world without boundaries; such exemplars include virtual offices, virtual businesses, virtual hospitals, and online trading. Moreover, modem information technology (IT) operations and IT enabled services can become virtual in terms of off shoring and near shoring. Data management and protection play a key role in advancing these services. It is recognized that while in transit from one physical location to another, personal, business, or govermmental sensitive data need to be protected.
In fact, data protection is necessary to ensure compliance with various privacy laws mandated by numerous countries. For example, in many jurisdictions, sensitive data is not permitted to enter foreign land. Consequently, data that crosses a foreign boundary needs to be de-personalized or sanitized. De-personalization, if performed effectively, can stimulate more offshore work.
Conventionally, cryptography has been utilized to ensure data protection. Even though classical cryptographic techniques address the concerns of privacy when data is in transit, such techniques do not effectively resolve the handling of data after its decryption. In addition, it is difficult to implement total communication security; such approach is not only costly, but key management is tedious. Further, because data can be accessed through any application (which protects user level authorization), the data can be inadvertently disclosed to an unauthorized end user.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach for de-personalizing data as to accommodate a wide range of applications.